Thomas Arnold

Thomas Arnold is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Tufts University Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a Research Associate at the Tufts University Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory. His research in AI, human-robot interaction, and ethical reasoning has sought to reveal implicit and explicit interactive norms while tracking what accountability means for AI systems implemented in real-time, socially charged contexts. His articles have addressed issues of explanation, safety, verification, and robotic touch, as well as the limits of moral dilemmas for articulating what robots should do.  He served as co-organizer of “Coding Caring,” one of two studies commissioned by the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100), and has recently published on ethical difficulties of generative AI assisting with long-term care. He assists in inter-religious, comparative discussions for the nonprofit group AI and Faith, including a research group examining different ideas of compassion that might influence AI usage and design. He has taught at Tufts, Harvard, Stonehill College, and Tsinghua University, and he is the co-author of Ethics for Psychologists: A Casebook Approach (Sage 2011). He recently completed his PhD. in religious studies at Harvard, with a dissertation on care, natality, and experience within the philosophy of religion.